"An astoundingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny—telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times." — Thomas Pynchon

"Scary, hilarious, and unforgettable . . . George Saunders is a writer of arresting brilliance and originality." — Tobias Wolff

"Saunders is a hilarious, wicked, and pitch-perfect satirist of our times, of course, but for a satirist he has a whole lot of heart." — Esquire

"Mr. Saunders writes like the illegitimate offspring of [Nathaniel] West and Kurt Vonnegut, perhaps a distant relative of Mark Leyner and Steven Wright. He's a savage satirist with a sentimental streak who delineates … the dark underbelly of the American dream: the losses, delusions, and terrors suffered by the lonely, the disenfranchised, the downtrodden and the plain unlucky.” — The New York Times

And that was before the “best book you’ll read” encomiums he’s receiving for his new book of stories, Tenth of December.

“Like Kurt Vonnegut before him, Saunders is morally acute and attuned to injustice. In this new collection, he also shows a new, more tender side. Even his writing about dark subjects like violence and suicide is shot through with illumination. In the best of these new stories — “Victory Lap,” “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” and “Tenth of December” — Saunders swings wide the gates and ushers us into the human realm with all its ambiguities. And somewhere in the background of most of these stories is the question: What would you do?”

This was harder than I thought it would be. Because I found myself pondering the notion of Greatness: What good is it? Why even have such a concept? In the end I answered myself: We need a concept of greatness so we can know in what direction we should morally aspire. A book answers this question most eloquently, it seems to me, in its voice; that is, in its attitude towards the mayhem it observes. A book can be like the voice of God, telling us what to think of ourselves. These are, for me, the books that do this most valuably: